Linguistics approach

Contents

Introduction 3

Chapter 1. Linguistics approach 4

Chapter 2.Anthropology approach 12

Chapter 3. Humour and comedy 15

Conclusion 25

Introduction

Humour is the tendency of particular cognitive experiences to provoke laughter and provide amusement. People of all ages and cultures respond to humour. The majority of people are able to be amused, to laugh or smile at something funny and thus they are considered to have a "sense of humour". The question of whether or not something is humorous is a matter of personal taste. The term derives from the humoral medicine of the ancient Greeks, which stated that a mix of fluids known as humours (Greek: χυμός, chymos, literally juice or sap, metaphorically, flavour) controlled human health and emotion. A sense of humour is the ability to experience humour, although the extent to which an individual will find something humorous depends on a host of variables, including geographical location, culture, maturity, level of education, intelligence and context.

Many theories exist about what humour is and what social function it serves. It would be very difficult to explain humor to a hypothetical person who did not himself have a sense of humor already. In fact, to such a person humor would appear to be quite strange if not outright irrational behavior. Something humourous to an individual can be entirely repulsive to another. Among the prevailing types of theories that attempt to account for the existence of humor there are: psychological theories, the vast majority of which consider humor to be very healthy behavior; there are spiritual theories which may, for instance consider humor to be a "gift from God"; there are also theories that consider humor to be an unexplainable mystery,very much like a mystical experience.

The English Sense of Humour is considered to be very special. Most foreigners do not understand English jokes; the British think that their sense of humour is unique and superior to anyone else’s. This paper covers various approaches to defining the features of English humour.

The present research paper contains Introduction, 3 Chapters, Conclusion, References, Illustrations, and 1 Table. The introduction provides general information on the research – its topic, aim and object under the study. Every chapter is dedicated to the analysis of English humour in different aspects of life. The list of references includes all the sources that have been used in the work process. Table 1 includes English humour in structure and some examples.

Linguistics approach

Most linguistic deviances which occur in informal conversations are based on a humorous use of word play. But word play can appear in several different situations. Sometimes it can be isolated and unpremeditated as in spontaneous wisecrack, quip or deliberate pun. Sometimes it can be pre-planned and structured, as in the lampoon, impersonation, cartoon, caricature, especially in such literary genres as parody or satire.

But in most cases humour can arise as a result of unintentional use of language such as howlers, misprints, slips of the tongue and accidental puns.

Graphological humour

Graphological humour consists of deviation from the norms of spelling, punctuation, layout. Typography motivates a great deal of written humour. Some jokes which are based on the use of misprints, mis-spellings and graffiti work only in the written mode.

· What did one sheep say to the other?

I love ewe.

· Bakers knead to do it.

· Why did the antelope?

Nobody gnu.

Graphological deviance can be seen in the basis of the effect in the children’s poem by Charles Connell “please ptell me Pterodactyl”(1985). There is a spelling exception which is turned into a general rule.

Please ptell me, Pterodactyl

Who ptaught you how pto fly?

Who ptaught you how pto flap your wings

And soar up in the sky?

No prehistoric monster

Could ptake off just like you

And pturn and ptwist and ptaxi

Way up there in the blue.

Phonological humour

Many jokes rely on a deviation from the normal use of sounds by adding, deleting, substituting or transposing vowels or consonants. Traditionally such kinds of jokes are based on transposing sounds and using similarities in pronunciation to mix up words.

· Patient: Doctor! I think I’m a bird.

Doctor: I’ll tweet you in a minute.

· What do you get if you cross a chicken and a bell?

An alarm cluck.

· What’s the difference between a sick cow and an angry crowd?

One moos badly and the other boos madly.

Some phonological jokes rely on features of connected speech or prosody:

· Teacher: use the word antennae in a sentence.

Charlie: there antennae sweets left.

· What book tells you about famous owls?

Who’s Whoooo.

Some types of phonological pattern are totally identified with humour - notably the fixed and formulaic rhythms which identify a limerick. In the manners of Edward Lear, Ogden Nash there are ingenious interplays between graphology and phonology

A girl who weighed many an oz,

Used language I dare not pronoz,

For a fellow unkind

Pulled her chair off behind -

Just to see (so he said) if she’d boz.

There once was a boy of Baghdad,
An inquisitive sort of a lad,
Who said, "I will see
If a sting has a bee."
And he very soon found that it had!

Morphological humour

This group consists of all jokes which are formed by manipulation of the elements of word structure (such as affixes, prefixes), combining elements into novel forms of dividing words in unusual places.

· Why did the matchbox? Because it saw the tin can.

· Did you hear about Robin Hood? He just had an arrow escape.

· What do you call a man with a shovel sitting at the bottom of a hole?

Doug.

· And what do you call a man with a shovel sitting at the bottom of a smaller hole?

Douglas (=Doug-less)

Graffiti sequences often play with word boundaries:

· BE ALERT! Your country needs lerts.

- No, Britain has got enough lerts now. Be aloof.

- No, be alert. There’s safety in numbers.

Silly book-titles also rely on making wrong divisions within the author’s name, as well as on lexical punning or semantic allusion:

· Hushbye Baby by Wendy Bough-Brakes.

· Looking after the garden by Dan D. Lion

The bizarre lexical collocations of a great deal of nonsense verse are motivated by rhyme. Here is the example of Denis Lee’s poem ‘on Tuesdays I polish my uncle’.

So my dad he got snarky and barked at the shark.

Who was parking the ark on the mark in the dark.

And when they got back they had ants in their pants,

Dirt in their shirt, glue in their shoe,

Beans in their jeans, a bee on their knee,

Beer in their ear and a bear in their hair,

A stinger in each finger, a stain in their brain,

A small polka-dot burp, with headache tablets,

And a ship on the lip and a horse, of course,

So we all took a bath in the same tub and went to bed early.

Lexical humour

Puns play a great role in lexical humour. Puns are often classified into semantic and phonological types. Semantic puns focus on the alternative meanings or usage of a word or phrase. They often occur in riddles.

· What has four legs and only one foot? A bed.

· What did the explorer say when he met a koala in the outback?

I can’t bear it.

· When is an ambulance not an ambulance?

When it turns into a hospital.

Phonological puns play upon two different words which sound the same. Most jokes are auditory ones. Sometimes writing them down in traditional orthography prejudges the answer or gives the fame away.

· Waiter, waiter, what’s this? It’s bean soup.

I can see that. But what is it now?

· What’s black and white and red all over?

A newspaper.

Syntactic humour

In this category riddles involve syntactic ambivalence, where one construction is interpreted as if it were another. This is the source of humour in dangling participle constructions and in the genre known as Tom Swifties.

· What kind of animal can jump higher than a house?

All kinds. Houses can’t jump.

· Call me a cab. Sir, you are a cab.

· We’re having your mother-in-law far dinner tonight.

I’d rather have chicken.

Tom Swifties is the genre of word play which relies on a combination of grammatical and lexical elements operating in a formulaic sentence structure. It was originated by Edward Stratemeyer in a series of strip cartoons about a character called Tom Swift.

· "I'm wearing my wedding ring," said Tom with abandon.

· "I'm concerned about the number of people not attending," said Tom absentmindedly.

· "Who would want to steal modern art?" asked Tom abstractedly.

· "Now I can chop down that tree," said Tom with a heavy accent.

· "Let's all play an A, a C sharp, and an E," cried Tom's band with one accord.

· "I gave the donkey some vinegar," said Tom acidly.

· "There's room for one more," Tom admitted.

· "They are not answering - we'd better try the knocker," said Tom adoringly.

· "I'll eat till I burst," Tom agreed.

· "Fire!" yelled Tom alarmingly.

Discourse humour

The vast majority of jokes have a fixed discourse structure. Often, stories are told in threes, as in the most famous trio of all, the English man, Irish man, and Scotsman. Most riddles use one of a small number of favoured wh-question structures.

· What’s the difference between an X and a Y?

· Why did the A do B?

· What did the X say to the Y?

· When is a B not a B?

· What do you get when you cross an X with a Y?

There are many types of interactive jokes, such as the music-hall I say I say I say, as well as Knock knock, Doctor Doctor, Waiter Waiter and other emergency jokes.

· Doctor, Doctor, I wake up feeling terrible! My head spins and the room’s going round.

You must be sleeping like a top!

· Knock, Knock. Who’s there? Cows go. Cows go who? No, they don’t, cows go moo.

Some discourse jokes break the pragmatic rules of conversation, or play with the conversations of sequence and cross-reference. Riddles ogten turn the tables in this way.

· Constantinople is a long word. Can you spell it?

I T.

· Good morning, doctor, I’ve lost my voice.

Good morning Mr. Smith, and what can I do for you?

Variety humour

The existence of language variety is a major source of humour, in speech and writing, in everyday language and in literature, all over the English-speaking world. The regional accents and dialects within a community readily lend themselves to comic exaggeration. If a variety is used as a prestige dialect, its forms provide an effective means of satirizing the elite group who speak it. Occupational varieties, such as those of the policeman, lawyer, or cleric, are especially vulnerable. And a speech idiosyncrasy, such as a weakly articulated /r/ or /s/, is a gift to a vocal satirist. The funny voices of many US cartoon characters illustrate the point- ‘It’s a wabbit’, howls Elmer Fudd, and Bugs Bunny replies with a nasal twang sharp enough to cut steel.

We are most conscious of these effects when they are produced by the professional comedians and impressionists; and some ‘schools’ of comedy have in fact relied heavily on the exaggerated or incongruous use of the varieties of English. In the UK, an influential example was the Monty Python TV series of the 1970s, which regularly used situations where people spoke in an unexpected or inappropriate way. A football commentary, for example, might be carried on in a style of the Authorized Version of the Bible. In the USA, the ‘laugh in’ TV series of the 1960s, having established characters with particular vocal styles, would then introduce there styles into situations where they would not usually found. The mock-German accent of one of the characters, for example, might be encountered in a court of law a high-class restaurant.

Variations of this kind are part of everyday speech, too.

· During a meeting to discuss student applications, an interviewer expresses anxiety that the interviewees won’t say very much; ‘ Ve haf vays off making them tock’, says another, lapsing into a mock-German interrogation style.

· A British car-driver finally gets a reluctant engine to fire, and presses the accelerator triumphantly, saying ‘We have lift-off’, in the mock-American tones a NASA mission controller.

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